The final project for this course is to write a proposal for
a digital history project. Although most people will decide to propose
something for the World Wide Web, you can propose to use any media
(e.g., cd-rom or floppy disk) in which you will convey information
in the past in digital form.

The project can encompass any of the different genres of historical
presentation that we have discussed in the course, e.g., an archive,
an electronic essay, a textual edition, an exhibit, a teaching resource,
or a discussion area.

Some students in the course will be taking the second course in the
New Media sequence in the spring ("Creating Digital Media").
They may want to purse the projects proposed here in that class. If
so, they need the approval of the course's instructor, Paula Petrik.
If you would like tentative approval to pursue your project further,
you should indicate that when you submit your prospectus on 18 October
and Paula will review it jointly with me.

Proposals, which will be presented on-line, must contain the features
listed below, although you can organize your presentation in whatever
format you prefer. The answers you provide you should be more than
cursory; you should be writing at least 3,000 words of prose in most
cases. You should try to make a convincing case for why your proposal
makes sense and why, for example, an organization or funder might
support it.

1. An explanation of the scope of the
project and the genre of project you are proposing. This would
include a discussion of the content of the site (what kinds of thing
are you going to include) as well as the audience(s) for the site
(who is the site for and how are you going to reach that audience).

2.
An overall map (visual or prose or both) of the structure of the site
and how people will navigate through.

3. A rationale for why a digital format makes sense rather than some
traditional format.

4. A review and analysis of sites/project
that are similar in content and genre and how your project builds
upon or improves upon what has already been done.

5. A concrete discussion of the technical plan for producing the
site, e.g., what kinds of software tools will you use? Will it be
done as a database or as flat html pages? You should base this section
of the proposal, in part, on examining closely a site that you
see as a model (even a partial model) for what you want to do. Try
to carefully examine the architecture and design of that site to figure
out what is involved. You interview (phone or email) one of the creators
of the site to find out what steps they took and what barriers they
encountered.

6.
A home page for the project.

Groups of two or three people could propose to work together on these
projects. If so, you should be aware of the following caveats. The
expectation in terms of scale and quality of work increases directly
with the number of people involved. Projects done by two people should
naturally be twice as large and/or well developed as those done by
one person. Groups will need to accept that all members of the group
will receive the same grade for the project, unless you can come up
with an alternative arrangement to which we can all agree.